Off to a bad start

Hmm.. So I’m in class at the moment and at the beginning of class the teacher asks “So, how did the homework go for everybody” and I’m thinking what homework? I dont remember any homework. Then his next statement after nobody has any questions is “Alright then, if it was that easy lets go ahead and turn it in”.

Shit…

I totally dont remember him saying anything about homework. I looked over the assignment (which I now know was posted on his website) and it was really easy

Not like its going to break my whole semester, but its never fun to start out a class with a 0.

Catching Up

Yeah, so I wrote a post and thought I published it, but it seems to have disappeared and I don’t have the enthusiasm to re-write it, so I’ll re-cap.

I haven’t had a chance to announce the newest addition to our backyard yet. If you religiously check my page at work you may have figured it out because I did upload the pictures. 4th of July, Becca, Cody and I went out to Target and bought the Intex 10′x3′ Round Metal Frame Pool and set it up with the help of everybody that was over. It’s an awesome deal at only $80 which included everything necessary for water lovin’ fun (except the water of course). Becca and Cody liked it so much they went out and bought one for their backyard the next day. Not many pictures, but you can see it here: Pool Pics

Keith’s 22nd Birthday was on the 6th, the whole family had dinner at Fat’s in Folsom to celebrate.

On Saturday I went to Chris and Michelle’s Wedding. I was really happy to see them finally tie the knot; I know they will be happy for a very long time to come. They are currently in Hawaii on their Honeymoon, but Chris has challenged himself with keeping a Blog of their time there. Check it out here, there are lots of pictures and even some video for those that don’t like to read. And for the few pictures that I took at their wedding, check out the website I made for their wedding, and particularly the wedding album. I was in charge of Video for their wedding, so I didn’t get a chance to take many pictures unfortunately.

I’ve been out of the office at work almost every day for the past two weeks and its killing me. I worked a half day on the 3rd (was the only one in the office too). The 4th was obviously a holiday. I was in the office on the 5th (Wednesday) and had a boatload of things to do which I couldn’t get done. Then Thursday and Friday I was in the AMP Act 1 training which is “Installing and Connectorizing LAN Cabling Systems”. Monday I had a Vision User Basics training that I did from Home. Tuesday I was in the office and again trying to catch up. I worked a 13 hour day and still couldn’t get everything done that I wanted. That brings us up to Today, where I started the Act 3 portion of the same AMP training (Designing Premises Cabling Systems) that will take me through the end of the week. I did get approval from my boss though to work all the overtime I needed to get my tasks done, so although I’ll probably complain about working a lot, there should be some nice paychecks in my future.

Going back a few days, I did sell my Altima. I had made a mistake in the asking price that I put on the listing, so I feel like I could have gotten more for the car, but that’s water under the bridge at this point. I did still come out about even with when I bought the car as far as taking home about what I put down on the car originally so I can’t complain too much. The guy paid me in cash, so it was kind of fun to have a HUGE wad of 100 dollar bills in my pocket. I should have taken a picture to go with the one from when I sold my Eclipse, but I unfortunately already deposited the cash.

I do want to note that talked to Melinda night before last. She was in Chris and Michelles wedding (if you look in the pictures she is the Bridesmaid with blond hair). I had a fun time catching up with her on what she’s doing and such. She’s living in Utah at the moment, but at the beginning of September her contract with the performing company she is with will be up and she may be coming home. For those who don’t know, I did go on a couple dates with Melinda, and I think we both had a great time but she moved down to UC Irvine and although I visited her once it never really went anywhere, but who knows the future could hold anything. I did bring up going to Ashland when she’s home to see the Shakespeare festival since she likes theatre and she seemed to like the idea. If nothing else, she is just a really fun person to do things with.

So anyway, I think this post is actually longer than the one that I wrote earlier so I suppose it was just my Blog making sure I was creating worthwhile posts that you could use to pass at least 5 minutes at work with, but I’m done writing now, so get back to working… or leave me a comment and you could easily pass another minute or two.

The Usuals Rock Old Ironsides

Thursday night I went out to Old Ironsides in Sacramento to see the Usuals play. They were on last out of 3 bands so they didn’t even start playing until around 11.

Up first was a band from New Mexico who are all still in High School. The name of the band is “Overnight”, but I can’t for the life of me find any kind of web page or myspace debauchery for them. I was relatively unimpressed with them live. Their bassist looked and sounded like he was mentally retarded (and no, he wasn’t really I talked to him after the show, he just goes all weird on stage). However, Jen bought their CD and I Ninja Looted it from her to listen to them recorded and there are two songs on their CD I do like which they didn’t play live because it sounds like their are more instruments than players (the beauty of recording studios). If you have the CD (somehow) the tracks I’m referring to are the last two on the album, if I can get their permission, or find their website I’ll see if I can get them for you to listen to.

The second band “We Prick You” might have been good, but honestly they were so loud that I couldn’t really distinguish their sound beyond LOUD. They did have one cool thing, its only two guys. All their songs are played by one drummer and one guitarist/singer. The guitarist has a ridiculous number of pedals and midi devices to help fill in and change up the sound and he did a good job of it.

Last on for the night was of course The Usuals, and they just plain kicked ass. Throughout the night there were maybe 8 people up by the stage to listen to the bands, and pretty much all of them I knew and were there to see The Usuals. When The Usuals started playing though they drew in the bar area, and had probably close to 20 people listening to the music and cheering between songs.

I think the biggest difference between the bands was how much fun they had on stage, overnight were very timid, We Prick You looked like they were bored but The Usuals were cracking jokes and having a good time. Cody even played with his fly down to please the ladies (He didn’t realize until the end of the show when his wife pointed it out).

In all the show was great and I really hope that those guys get a Friday night appearance somewhere because I think once that happens they’ll really take off. They have a few upcoming shows in Sacramento at the moment; you can always find their upcoming shows here.

One show, that isn’t listed on their web page, will be at our house, on May 20th as part of my 23rd Birthday celebrations.

And last but not least, maybe it was because I was having a good time or maybe it’s just to see if Cody really does read this but Cody and Becca’s friend Ricky Lee Riki-Lee was there too, and I thought she was pretty cute.

LFG Scholo 5-Man

I’m addicted, and if you understood the title of this post you probably are too.

If you dont understand the title you probably think I’m addicted to crack, and to be honest you really aren’t all that far off. Now wait, dont start freaking out I’m not doing anything Illigal or immoral. What I’m addicted to is a video game. And because I want an excuse to embed a google video in my blog, instead of giving you the name of the game right off the bat, I’m going to make you watch the game trailor.

I know you just tried to cheat and not watch the video, yeah thats right, I caught you so get your scrawny little mouse cursor back up and click play. Thank you.

So now that you know what the game is (watch the video dangit, I’m not giving it away anywhere below here) you probably still don’t have a clue what the title of this post means. Allow me to translate. If a user posts this in chat he/she is “Looking For a Group (LFG) to go to an area in the game named Scholomance, in a group of 5 people”.

I’m personally about to reach lvl 40 (I’m 3,000 exp away, w00t!), which is a big step in the game in which I can get a mount that has some serious implications to my ability to get from place to place in the game.

Its funny that I play as much as I do, a year or so ago Keith and Chadd were both really into the game and tried to get me to play, but I didn’t want to spend the $15/month on the subscription. I actually dont really remember them playing much even though Keith made it all the way to level 39 before finally canceling his account. Now our roles are reversed, Keith and Chadd dont play and I’m addicted.

If you do play, look for a Night Elf named Sinisha on the Daggerspine server. You can also check out the website of The Forgotten Samurai, a site I put together for my guild.

Inside your Computer, The Hard Disk Drive

The calculations are approximates and done by me, but most of the rest of this information was shamelessly borrowed from StorageReview.com. The video is from the Colorado State College of Engineering, Dr. David G. Alciatore, PE (“Dr. Dave”) website.

To many people, a hard disk is a “black box” of sorts–it is thought of as just a small device that “somehow” stores data. There is nothing wrong with this approach of course, as long as all you care about is that it stores data. If you use your hard disk as more than just a place to “keep stuff”, then you want to know more about your hard disk. It is hard to really understand the factors that affect performance, reliability and interfacing without knowing how the drive works internally. Fortunately, most hard disks are basically the same on the inside. While the technology evolves, many of the basics are unchanged from the first PC hard disks in the early 1980s.

Every hard disk contains one or more flat disks that are used to actually hold the data in the drive. These disks are called platters (sometimes also “disks” or “discs”). They are composed of two main substances: a substrate material that forms the bulk of the platter and gives it structure and rigidity, and a magnetic media coating which actually holds the magnetic impulses that represent the data. Hard disks get their name from the rigidity of the platters used, as compared to floppy disks and other media which use flexible “platters” (actually, they aren’t usually even called platters when the material is flexible.)

The platters are “where the action is”–this is where the data itself is recorded. For this reason the quality of the platters and particularly, their media coating, is critical. The surfaces of each platter are precision machined and treated to remove any imperfections, and the hard disk itself is assembled in a clean room to reduce the chances of any dirt or contamination getting onto the platters.

The read/write heads of the hard disk are the interface between the magnetic physical media on which the data is stored and the electronic components that make up the rest of the hard disk (and the PC). The heads do the work of converting bits to magnetic pulses and storing them on the platters, and then reversing the process when the data needs to be read back.

Read/write heads are an extremely critical component in determining the overall performance of the hard disk, since they play such an important role in the storage and retrieval of data. They are usually one of the more expensive parts of the hard disk, and to enable areal densities and disk spin speeds to increase, they have had to evolve from rather humble, clumsy beginnings to being extremely advanced and complicated technology. New head technologies are often the triggering point to increasing the speed and size of modern hard disks.

In a typical consumer hard drive like what’s in your computer now, the platter spins at 7,200 RPM (85 MPH on the outside edge), and the head can seek to a track (move from one place on the platter to another) in an average of 9ms ( 9 one thousandths of a second). The SCSI hard drives that are in servers and extremely high performance desktops spin at 15,000 RPM (180 MPH on the outside edge) and can seek in an average of 3.3ms. Take a look at this video clip demonstrating the seek speed of a typical consumer hard drive.

Moving Servers

I’ll be spending today moving Indemnity83.com to a new server, so if you may see some downtime. Because the site is fairly static I plan on bringing up the second location in parallel with this one and then correcting the DNS to point to the new server so the downtime should be minimal.

Indemnity83.com is huge as far as personal websites go, comming in at just under 4.5GB but luckily the new server and old server are in the same data center, so I can transfer at full network speeds. I’ll still be with 1&1, and would highly recomend them to anyone for web hosting. I originally got on a 3 year free contract, and recently was offered the Developer Package at 50% as an upgrade on my 3-year contract. Indemnity83.com is on its own Developer package at the moment, but I have no need for two packages, so thats why I’m moving.

So now that I’ve bored everybody with my reasons, I should actually get started and stop wasting time.

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Files have all been copied, and the new site is setup to run from the existing database, I’m just waiting on the domain move and DNS to update. If everything goes well you’ll never notice the downtime.

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Everything is all transfered. Leave me a comment if you notice anything out of whack.

No Fate

One of the guys at work is in a band currently named “No Fate”, although they are going to be changing their name soon because they found another band is already using the name. Anthony is one of the CAD guys here at EDC, and the drummer for the band. He describes their music is Bar Rock. I would compare it to rock from the early 90’s from bands like Nirvana. The player below has 6 of their songs (I have permission) so feel free to listen for yourself and leave some comments. They don’t have a website or anything yet, but if you want to get a hold of the band to do a show in the greater Sacramento area, contact Tom at (916) 949-5247

Enjoy!

P.S. the player above is the XSPF Web Music Player (Flash)

MySpace Sucks

So I went to the dark side, I signed up for a MySpace account. But before you call me a sellout, let me explain.

I F***ING HATE MYSPACE

And the worst part is that every one of my friends uses it, so I have to watch what I say. But basically the software is crap with more bugs than you can shake a stick at, inconsistencies, old features with links that go nowhere or messages saying “That feature was moved, go here”. As well, it seethes with seriously design challenged users who think blue text on a black background is cool, or text that goes overtop of a picture of you and your girlfriend making any color text impossible to read as well as covering up the picture you are so proud of.

So why did I sign up for an account? Well I started a website up, http://www.ifuckinghatemyspace.com and I wanted to at least be able to defend any claims I make by being sure I know what I’m talking about. Also, I wanted to see what is possible with the design engine of MySpace, how much of these poor design are the fault of the users and not of the website (I’m sure it’s about equal parts).

I noticed two things right off the bat when I setup my account. I’m in my own freaking “Extended Networking”. How ridiculous is this system, its not even smart enough to see who I am before displaying the message. Also, the “Home” link has taken me to at least 3 different places depending on where I was in the site. One time to an error page, once to what I would expect to see and yet another time it took me to my profile.

I don’t claim to be some expert designer, I’m still pretty new to most of it myself, but I at least know enough that a link that says “Home” should always go to the same page, no matter where you are in the site.

Bah, I digress for now or I’ll rant well above my point. I’m going to set to seeing what kind of a page I can generate.

Battle of the Titans

Dell released their 30″ Monitor with a hidden tagline: “Apple, eat your heart out.”

Although technologically (on paper anyway) there is isn’t much difference between the Apple 30″ Cinema Display and Dell’s new offering. But in true Dell style, it’s a couple hundred dollars lighter on the pocketbook. They have the same ‘optimal’ resolution (a mind blowing 2650 x 1600) but that resolution requires a video card with dual-link DVI. I haven’t really looked into this technology, but I assume that it means each of the two DVI outputs handles half of the screen output.

The price of these screens still makes them un-touchable to us mere mortals but perhaps now with some competition the price of the Mega-Screens will come down into the sub $2000 level. More immediately though, the price of the Dell 24″ screen has come down a few hundred dollars, at least temporarily, with an instant savings of $220.

A quick look at some comparable numbers from their respective sites may give more information than I could sentence out. So instead of making up comparisons of screens that I have never really been able to play with myself I’ll just leave you to the numbers. For more info, check Dell’s or Apple’s respective website.

Postcards

So like I mentioned before, I’ve been doing some work on a marketing campaign at work, creating a multi faceted assault on a large list of clients to try to get them to think of our name when the are doing projects.

I recently finished up one of the pieces, a postcard, and got it back from the printer on Wednesday. I am extreemly happy with the results. We went with 4by6.com to do the printing, and they did a great job. Kind of impersonable if you use their “self service” stuff, but thats how I like it sometimes. I will definatly go back to them to have business cards printed if I ever settle on a design for that. We got the satin finish, which makes the cards feel and look incredible. Like they are coated in a really high temp wax or something.

If you want to see what they look like, I’ve uploaded the front and back to my gallery. So feel free to take a look, and make some comments. I will use the comments as guidance on the next ones.

Now I just need to wrap up our website by the end of the month and we’ll be ready to start mailing out the 1,000 we had printed.